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You have not defined "conscience" yet assume that everyone is talking about the same thing. If your "conscience" is based on god dogma, then there is disagreement with your definition. All social structure is instinctively driven with the rationality to defend it part of the process. Also, Judeo-Christian ethics might be an oxymoron.

The preamble contains a statement that the means for forming a conscience are probably genetic and the contents of the conscience are learned or imprinted (like language) along with the person's culture. In other words, the conscience is heavily dependent on the person's environment during the very early years of life and can be modified by other environments during the various stages of moral development and reasoning.

There is no agreement, accept among those who have a religious agenda that must be upheld, that moral absolutes exist. There is absolutely no agreement over what these moral absolutes are and no evidence that a universal moral code ever existed or even could exist.

"When I was an atheist" What does "atheist" mean to you Michael? Most atheists are so for logical reasons and the number of us that return to an intellectual black hole [such as religion] of any kind is so small as to be almost nothing. So what do you mean when you say "i was an atheist?" Did you examine the evidence and conclude that god was unlikely? Did you look at religious texts and find them horrible? Did you start to wonder how any one god of today was more likely than any other or even more likely than ancient myth gods? This is what an atheist does.

Hear hear. We behave better because we can make practical decisions about things. We don't have some obtuse set of bad and conflicting rules guiding us. Without any outside help, we can see keeping slaves as morally reprehensible beyond all humanity. If we go by the Bible, we'd be talking about just how much we should beat them and still be within god's law.

If you are a non- believer in, all that you do is being recorded in the heavens, why be moral when no one is looking?

Why not?

Being good is good for yourself and for the others you care about. It's circular for most people and a provable survival mechanism. What benefits one, some and all means we continue. Not moral just instinct.

Seriously? This argument? The whole "How can you be moral without god" argument is quite possibly the second most ridiculous thing a theist can bring up. Only the "<insert evil asshat here> was evil, and an atheist, so all atheists are evil asshats" is slightly more ridiculous.

I'm a moral person, because my actions have the capability to affect, both directly and indirectly, the people around me and the rest of society. I want to make sure that I try to do right by my own guidelines, as well as the rest of society. If you don't understand that, then I don't know what to tell you.

The operative here is still a conscience of which I contend is created by God. Animals do not evolve a conscience in a survival of the fittest scheme. This is a perplexing enigma among many social scientist.